Monthly Archives: March 2009

I haven’t had many breaks this month while I’ve had two practically back to back projects to color. I did get a nice one yesterday as we celebrated my friend Lisa’s birthday at Animal Kingdom. Jacob and Lisa had one day before they left town for a wedding to take advantage of the celebration special Disney is doing right now, so we hit the park. It really put me in the mood for doing the same on my own birthday, coming along in just a few weeks. I loved the button she had to wear and the way every castmember is compelled to wish her a Happy Birthday. That’s my kind of day.

Unfortunately the days off are few and far between right now while the projects from Japan come fast and furious. I’ve gotten questions from people wondering what the updates on my status are all about, I’m sure it sounds weird to hear I’m coloring vegetables. To clarify, Scott does illustration work for a school in Japan and they have some odd storylines sometimes. I help him color them on the months when it’s too expensive to hire that out, which is most of the time. I can’t show a sample from what I’m working on now because it hasn’t been published yet, but it’s not too different from the one I worked on this last Christmas. Both stories were about vegetables. In the current story, fruits and vegetables are fighting with each other over which is better. They determine “better” by either being longer, shinier, fuzzier, it varies.

Avast there ye V8

Last Christmas the vegetables were pirates. I couldn’t tell you what the kids are supposed to be learning from these stories, but I can say I’ve really been trying to take quality up a notch in the latest series. I like the results but on the bad side I feel like I’ve spent way too much time on my butt lately. Yesterday’s day out was a relief, I really need to get through this level so I can have more like it. Also I forgot my camera so I’ll have to figure out how to get pictures off my mobile phone before I can post them.

I think I spent the entire first few weeks of February coloring, and the last two weeks too sick to get out of bed. When Scott gets on these crunch assignments for Japan, the inevitable result is me sitting on my butt in front of the computer night after night. It’s not surprising that leads to sleep deprivation during the time of year when I need it most to fend off my grass allergies, and that days of constant hay fever carefully cultivate a sinus infection. This one has been hard to get rid of. Especially since I have begun a new project of my own: getting my MBA.

I did some research at the beginning of 2009 and confirmed that I would need to take my GMAT to even consider getting into graduate school. This is someone who hasn’t taken a math class since I left Georgia Tech, when a miserable experience with Calculus III left no doubt in my mind that I would never make it through Calc IV and V (It’s a weird thing about Tech – the students refer to ever class by an abbreviation. Calculus = Calc, Chem = Chemistry, Diffy Q’s = Differential Equations, etc. I never got it. Probably contributed to my exit). So I picked up my GMAT for Dummies book, generously passed along from a friend currently in grad school, and gave myself a crash course in math.

I was never that great in math. I say that, while I admit, I did take nothing but honors math all the way to graduation from high school, and even made a high enough score on the AP test to get out of a quarter of college Calculus. But I had to work very, very hard at it. So hard that I barely gave any other class a second thought, never studied for much of anything else beyond taking a passing glance at science, and was darn lucky I didn’t have to. By the time I was struggling through Calc III, I had to acknowledge I was faking my way through it, I didn’t really understand it and I needed to get out. I transferred my goals to be a computer programmer to computer artist. No math in art school for me.

I just spent a month confronted with math concepts I hadn’t thought twice about in years. A math tutor might have helped, but on my own, I had limited success at figuring out how to approach most of the problems. Of any type. The book didn’t quite cover all of the material I was confronted with on the practice tests. I was freaking out by the time I had to go to my testing appointment, and I was recovering from an illness. I’m going to say straight up, I still don’t understand finding “Work.” It looks like it should be so simple too. When I took the test I got caught up in the problems I had half a chance at solving and didn’t come close to finishing the Quantitative section.

So my scores mirrored my SATs: near 100% on the verbal, on the math, just plain sad. But one made up for the other and I surpassed the minimum I needed. On to the next step: application!